Price of Cigarettes UK 2026: Pack Cost and Duty Data

If you are checking the price of cigarettes in the UK in 2026, the last official shop-price figure is £16.60 for 20 in January 2025 (about £18 once updated with ONS price indices to August 2026, which is our estimate), and duty has risen twice since: to £394.09 per 1,000 cigarettes plus 16.5% of the retail price from 1 October 2026. This guide gives the duty rates with their effective dates, the ONS price history, the yearly cost of 10 or 20 a day and the free help available.

The short answer: about £16.60 a pack at the last ONS reading, and duty keeps rising

The last official average price for a pack of 20 king size filter cigarettes in the UK is £16.60, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) series for January 2025. It is the last data point in that series, so we cannot give you an official 2026 pack price. What we can give you is the 2026 duty, which is what drives the price. From 1 October 2026 the duty on cigarettes is £394.09 per 1,000 cigarettes plus 16.5% of the retail price, which the government estimates adds £1.21 to a packet of 20. Sources: ONS RPI average price series and GOV.UK tobacco duty rates.

Two duty rises have taken effect since the ONS series ended: £0.57 per packet from 26 November 2025 and £1.21 from 1 October 2026, according to the government’s own estimates. Together that is £1.78 per pack of 20. The ONS still publishes cigarette price indices to August 2026, and those give a data-based estimate of the 2026 price, set out in the next sections: about £18 for a pack of 20 (an estimate, not a shelf price).

For prevalence and the wider picture, see our guide to UK smoking statistics in 2026 and how the UK compares in cigarette tax by country and the share of the pack.

Tobacco duty in 2026: the rates and the dates

UK tobacco duty on cigarettes has two parts: a specific amount per 1,000 cigarettes and an ad valorem amount of 16.5% of the retail price. There is also a Minimum Excise Duty, which applies if the calculated duty would be lower. HMRC publishes the rates with their effective dates, shown below.

The specific part alone on a pack of 20 is £7.88 from 1 October 2026, up from £7.07 on 26 November 2025 and £6.69 on 30 October 2024. The 16.5% of retail price comes on top, so duty grows with the price as well.

Worked through, the specific part of the duty is 39.4 pence per cigarette from 1 October 2026 and the Minimum Excise Duty floor is 51.9 pence per cigarette. The specific part on a pack of 20 therefore rose by £1.19 in two years, from £6.69 to £7.88. As an illustration of the percentage part, 16.5% of a £16.60 retail price is £2.74, and 16.5% of £18.38 (the ONS price plus the two later duty estimates) is £3.03. The percentage part grows whenever the price does.

The floor works like this: if the Tobacco Duty on cigarettes is lower than the Minimum Excise Duty, the Minimum Excise Duty must be applied instead.

From 1 October 2026 the minimum is £10.38 on a pack of 20. These are duty figures, not shop prices, and they exclude retail margin and any other taxes.

What the ONS says a pack of 20 costs

The ONS tracks the average price of 20 king size filter cigarettes within the Retail Prices Index. The table shows how it moved from January 2019 to January 2025, the last month published.

The jump from £12.84 in January 2023 to £15.26 in January 2024 is the largest single-year rise in the table, at £2.42. After the duty step on 30 October 2024, the series rose from £15.88 in October 2024 to £16.35 in November 2024. The average price series carries no data after January 2025, and we found no dated ONS pack-price figure for 2026.

The ONS does publish cigarette price indices beyond that date. In its August 2026 data (released 16 September 2026), the RPI index for cigarettes (series DOBN, January 1987 = 100) stood at 1,236.4, against 1,142.2 in January 2025, a rise of 8.2%. The CPI index for cigarettes (series L7AQ, 2015 = 100) rose from 185.3 to 203.8, up 10.0%. Scaling the £16.60 price by those two changes gives about £17.97 and £18.26, so roughly £18. For comparison, adding the two duty estimates to £16.60 gives £18.38. These are three independent routes to the same ballpark, but each is our arithmetic on published numbers, not a price read off a shelf. The August 2026 data do not include the 1 October 2026 duty step. Sources: ONS RPI cigarettes index and ONS CPI cigarettes index.

Rolling tobacco: the 30 g pouch

Hand rolling tobacco duty is charged per kilogram: £476.83 from 30 October 2024, £503.80 from 26 November 2025 and £574.30 from 1 October 2026. The government estimates the changes add £2.32, 97 pence and £2.54 respectively to a 30 gram packet.

At £574.30 a kilogram, the duty in a 30 gram pouch works out to about £17.23 before the retailer and the manufacturer take their share. We did not find a dated, sourced shelf price for a 30 g pouch, so we do not quote one. Rolling your own does not avoid the duty.

Why UK prices rise in steps

Duty rates are changed on dates set by the government, and the effective dates on the GOV.UK page show three steps in two years: 30 October 2024, 26 November 2025 and 1 October 2026. Because 16.5% of the retail price is added on top of the specific amount, a price rise by the manufacturer also raises the duty. That is why the ONS series moves in jumps after each duty step rather than gradually.

For the government’s cost side, see our article on how much smoking costs the NHS.

What 10 or 20 a day costs per year

Using the last ONS price of £16.60 for 20, the table below shows the yearly cost of a pack-a-day and a half-pack-a-day habit. This is before the two later duty rises.

Now the 2026 estimate. At about £17.97 a pack (the £16.60 price scaled by the RPI cigarettes index to August 2026), the same habit costs roughly the figures below. This is an illustration, not a forecast and not a shelf price, since retailers set prices:

If the two later duty increases were passed on in full instead, a pack-a-day habit would cost about £6,709 a year (£18.38 a pack). Whichever number you use, it is thousands of pounds a year. Our worldwide comparison, the true cost of smoking per year by country, puts the UK beside other countries. Australia is the other extreme: see cigarette prices in Australia in 2026.

Free help to quit in the UK

The NHS offers the free NHS Quit Smoking app, which lets you track your progress, see how much you are saving, get daily support and get inspired by others. The NHS adds that if you reach 28 days smoke free you are 5 times more likely to quit for good. See the NHS quit smoking pages.

Local support is covered in NHS stop smoking services explained, and if you want to compare app options, see the best quit smoking apps in the UK and NHS options.

iQuit is another option for the day-to-day side. Its money dashboard works in pounds, so you can see what you have not spent, and it logs cravings with triggers and intensity and has an AI coach with free daily messages. It is free on Google Play and the App Store and works alongside NHS support, not instead of it.

Methodology and what we could not verify

• Duty: all rates, effective dates and impact estimates are from the HMRC page on GOV.UK. Specific duty on a pack of 20 is the per-1,000 rate times 20 divided by 1,000.
• Observed retail prices: ONS RPI average price for 20 king size filter cigarettes, series CZMP. It ends in January 2025. We did not use news articles or retailer websites, because we could not date and verify them, and supermarket listings for tobacco were not available to us.
• 2026 estimate: ONS RPI cigarettes index (DOBN) and CPI cigarettes index (L7AQ), August 2026 data released 16 September 2026, compared with January 2025. We multiplied £16.60 by the index ratios. Indices measure change across all cigarettes, so this is an approximation.
• Not verified: an observed 2026 shelf price. The ASH factsheet we planned to cite returned a not-found page.
• Not included: VAT, retailer margin and any local prices.

The 2026 in the title refers to the 2026 duty rates. Each price carries its date.

Frequently Asked Questions

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